“Mrs. Bolthuis wants you to help her with something. Ride over there and see what she wants. Homework can wait for once.”

“If you have to say you’re fine, you’re probably not,” the crow replied.

Lenore was at the cusp. I’m cusping, Percy, she rasped. Percy was unsure what to do about it. Press forward? Hang back?

Married twenty years today, Heather and Vic play that game.

They walked along the railroad somewhere in Atlanta on a cold and bitter night, the full moon above them like a yellow coin some unforgiving God had tossed far out into the galaxy. In the near

There is a crawl space in my lover’s house that his wife and children don’t know about. He likes to sing into it when he’s drunk and he’s only drunk when he’s with me.

A city wide boil advisory is still out. Brain eating amoebas were detected in the tap.

Q-tips were her guilty pleasure. She loved the feel of them caressing her inner ear, reaching the itch she could otherwise not scratch. Even when there wasn’t a swish of water lodged within, she loved

We heard something Anglo, unhinged, too human. We’d been hoping for Shrimp killing Cow or Cow killing Shrimp, but it was you, Bitcha, flailing and teetering about in the night sky.

She had us trade cardigans. She said it was an exercise in empathy. 

Toward the end, when heart disease had already taken my father, and my mother was alone—which she found intolerable—her doctors felt she had dementia. But I knew that was not the case. She had always

He was in love with his friend Faye, had known her since elementary school.

If you get this far, that means that things are all, more or less, going according to plan.

I was only doing what she asked:  Not listening. 

The Christian Movie Theatre is mainly for fans of poorly translated morality tales, the violent ends of saints and so forth.

Despite your better judgement, you click on his profile and then on the most recent post: a picture of him smiling on a white slope with his arm wrapped around a remarkably average, yet still somehow traditionally hot (not pretty, just hot) snow bunny.

I count the number of murderers in the class.

There was something that she wished to start, and when she started it, she figured, her life would take on new meaning. But in this moment in time, she ate breakfast bars all hours of the day and worried about money.

Nick your shin shaving, stare idly at the blood coursing down your foot and down the drain, and maybe this is how you do it, empty out all your insides until your shapeless skin is all that’s left.

I wanted to be “that girl,” but my new high-waisted pants from the Marais were already unbuttoned once.

Brian was psyched too. Not about her requests—Tom Waits was more his groove—but about where things seemed to be headed.

I have my tee already halfway over my head, blocking my eyes, when I feel a hand on my forearm, yanking me toward the other end of the field. “You can’t do that. Put it back on.”

To be naked on the beach after a storm is something special—the salt and the petrichor and the hum of being unsettled that maybe the torrential rains caused damage, that maybe there were nearby ships that will never make it to harbor.

Violet and I sit in her bed a while and talk. She shows me how to unhook and snake a bra through a sleeve.

“When Zac started writing the poems, I didn’t think it would get to this.”